Executive Director for Clinical Informatics, University of California Health Sciences and Services

Atul Butte, MD, PhD is the inaugural Director of the Institute of Computational Health Sciences (ichs.ucsf.edu) at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), and a Distinguished Professor of Pediatrics. Dr. Butte is also the Executive Director for Clinical Informatics across the six University of California Medical Schools and Medical Centers. Dr. Butte has authored over 200 publications, with research repeatedly featured in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Wired Magazine. Dr. Butte was elected into the National Academy of Medicine in 2015, and in 2013, he was recognized by the White House as an Open Science Champion of Change for promoting science through publicly available data. Dr. Butte is a principal investigator of three major programs: the California Initiative to Advance Precision Medicine; ImmPort, the clinical and molecular data repository for the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases; and the California Precision Medicine Consortium, helping recruit tens of thousands of participants into President Obama’s Precision Medicine Initiative. Dr. Butte is also a founder of three investor-backed data-driven companies: Personalis, providing medical genome sequencing services, Carmenta (acquired by Progenity), discovering diagnostics for pregnancy complications, and NuMedii, finding new uses for drugs through open molecular data. Dr. Butte trained in Computer Science at Brown University, worked as a software engineer at Apple and Microsoft, received his MD at Brown University, trained in Pediatrics and Pediatric Endocrinology at Children’s Hospital Boston, then received his PhD from Harvard Medical School and MIT.

Objectives
1. What is the nature of public molecular data?
2. How publicly-available molecular measurements can be used to find new uses for drugs, or new diagnostics for diseases.
3. What is big data in biomedicine, and how could it help with diagnostics and prognostics and precision medicine?

Abstract

There is an urgent need to take what we have learned in our new “genome era” and use it to create a new system of precision medicine, delivering the best preventative or therapeutic intervention at the right time, for the right patients. Dr. Butte’s lab at the University of California, San Francisco builds and applies tools that convert trillions of points of molecular, clinical, and epidemiological data — measured by researchers and clinicians over the past decade and now commonly termed “big data” — into diagnostics, therapeutics, and new insights into disease. Several of these methods or findings have been spun out into new biotechnology companies. Dr. Butte, a computer scientist and pediatrician, will highlight his lab’s recent work, including the use of publicly-available molecular measurements to find new uses for drugs including new therapies for autoimmune diseases and cancer, discovering new druggable targets in disease, the evaluation of patients and populations presenting with whole genomes sequenced, integrating and reusing the clinical and genomic data that result from clinical trials, discovering new diagnostics include blood tests for complications during pregnancy, and how the next generation of biotech companies might even start in your garage.